Pesticide-Free Soil Project
What is the Pesticide-Free Soil Project?
What’s New with the PFSP?
Our motto for this year’s work is: “Get pesticides off our campuses, cafeterias, and surrounding landscapes!” We’ll deepen our focus on supporting schools in the Rio District on these three levels, as well as providing peer-led workshops about anti-pesticide advocacy to the community at large. We’ll keep using arts-based organizing strategies as much as possible, going on engaging educational field trips, and getting to know the place and communities we live with on new levels.
Highlights include:
- Hands-on regenerative farming experiences at the Rio Regenerative Farm
We continue to learn from local leaders about regenerative ways to build soil, grow food, and create increased food security in our communities.
- Collaborating with Tequio and CAUSE’s Oxnard-based youth groups for the May 2025 Other Strawberry Festival
We are collaboratively planning an in-person Other Strawberry Festival, an event we have held virtually in previous years. It is an exploration of the health costs connected to conventional strawberry growing practices.The name references the strawberry industry’s annual festival promoting their crops and intends to offer a space for issues of environmental justice in the conversation. The event will include a youth-led performance of “Drift: An Interactive Play About Pesticides in Our Communities,” which features giant papier-mache puppets and props made by the three youth groups. It will also be a forum for sharing art zines made by the youth groups which feature artistic reflections on the youths’ unique lived experiences and provide information about important local concerns, including how to report pesticide drift and how to take action on banning specific harmful pesticides. The event will be by the community and for the community as a place to expose the connections between strawberry growing, pesticide exposure for farmworkers, pesticide runoff, and to imagine a world where growing strawberries reflects environmental, labor and racial justice.
- PFSP interns will bring performances of Drift: An Interactive Play About Pesticides in Our Communities to schools and local organizations.
The play’s Theater of the Oppressed format allows audience members to practice intervening in the story, how they might make a change, and generate new solutions to collective problems.
- Advocacy at the local, state and national levels
We continue our work with teachers and students to ask the Rio District School Board to formalize the pesticide-free landscape policy and to integrate more pesticide-free food in the cafeteria that serves thousands of meals each month as the official district-wide policy.
We will also continue to work with statewide and national organizations aimed at pesticide reduction.
Click here for Upcoming in Spring 2025
Compost Tea Party at a Rio Lindo Elementary School
A Compost Tea Party is an event that brings community members together to provide hands-on lessons and education for students, staff, and community members around nature-based climate solutions. These solutions include applying compost tea to campuses instead of toxic pesticides, having cafeterias serve local and organic food, providing garden-based and nutrition education, and much more. The event most often takes the form of an environmental fair held at our local public schools.
Interested in organizing a Compost Tea Party at your school or other community space?
PFSP staff and interns, in collaboration with the Rio School District and participating local organizations, have created a video that takes a step-by-step approach to how to organize a compost tea party at your school or in your community. The Compost Tea Party, a collaborative event with the Rio School District and local community organizations that not only takes the first step in moving away from using pesticides on school grounds but also provides workshops on nature-based climate solutions, addressing both farmworker and family health, soil health and climate change. This video was made possible by funding from the Cal EPA and shows how to replicate this successful project. Click on the image to view.
We also created an “Introduction to the Compost Tea Party” video designed for the school children at the host school. This video gives a short introduction to the Compost Tea Party and why it is important for soil health and holding carbon and inviting their participation in the event. We made an English version and a Spanish version, to be used at the discretion of the teacher.
Highlights from Spring 2024
- Hands-on regenerative farming experiences at Community Roots & Rio Regenerative Farm
We continued to learn from local leaders about regenerative ways to build soil, grow food, and create increased food security in our communities.
- Debut of “Drift: An Interactive Play About Pesticides in Our Communities” at the Climate Action Stage at Santa Barbara’s Earth Day Festival, Alameda Park, on April 27 at 3:00 p.m.
This play was a collaboration with MICOP’s Tequio and CAUSE’s youth groups. Together we made giant papier-mache puppets and props. The interactive format is considered a “rehearsal for real life”, in which real people can practice how they might make change and generate new solutions to collective problems. Click on the Arts and Activism toggle for more information and photos.
Click here for Program Details
Hands-on Farm experiences: This included learning and helping to build the Rio School District’s groundbreaking new farm, which is the first of its kind as a 10-acre site devoted to both education and production for the district’s school cafeterias. PFSP interns helped farmer Edgar Espinoza with the initial crop plantings, fertilizing, irrigating, and more in fall 2023. We will continue to learn from Edgar and help the Rio Regenerative Farm in its mission to bring local, pesticide-free food and education to the Rio School District.
Environmental Justice Theater Workshops: After completing the writing, rehearsal, and production of an original 20-minute participatory play in fall 2023, the PFSP interns will organize performances of the play at their own schools and organizations. The play’s Theater of the Oppressed format allows for audience members to practice ways of intervening in the story, which centers around the impact of pesticides on our local communities. This format is considered “rehearsal for real life,” in which real people can practice how they might make change and generate new solutions to collective problems.
We collaborated with Tequio and CAUSE’s Oxnard-based youth groups in a three-part workshop focused on arts-based activism around environmental justice issues in our region. The first two meetings were workshops that taught zine-making and puppet-making. The youth were led by PFSP intern Sarahi Noyola in how to make zines that share information, art, and writing about environmental justice topics, pesticides, and other topics they are passionate about. The youth learned large-scale puppet-making from a local community artist-activist, including construction, papier mache, painting, and costuming. These puppets were then be included as part of PFSP’s Theater of the Oppressed play about the impact of pesticides in our communities.
The third part in PFSP’s collaboration with Tequio and CAUSE’s youth groups included bringing the puppets, zines, and PFSP’s original play to perform and share at Earth Day events in our region, including Santa Barbara Earth Day, which draws over 30,000 visitors annually. This was another opportunity for many more people to understand the environmental justice issues in our region and generate possibilities for how we can make collective change. Click Arts and Activism toggle for photos.
Activism through Art at the Santa Barbara and Santa Paula Earth Day celebrations!
The Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival was an opportunity for the PFSP interns and staff to share their work on pesticide action with a new audience. The interns created a play that illustrated a young woman’s true story about the effects of pesticides near her school and the difficulty in making changes in policy. In collaboration with staff and youth from local organizations CAUSE and MICOP‘s Tequio youth group, they created colorful larger-than-life size puppets to help amplify the characters portrayed. Click to hear the back story.
True to the Theater of the Oppressed format, the audience participated in brain-storming on different ways to approach the issues. PFSP intern Jeyli facilitated their involvement by asking “what would you change?” and the audience responded enthusiastically — including joining the actors on the stage and adding new options for addressing the problem.
The puppets drew lots of people to the PFSP group before, during, and after the actual performance. We also handed out dozens of flyers that described how audience members could take action on re-banning Chlorpyrifos and report pesticide drift. Click for the flyer pdf.
Many people came up to talk with us after the play about connecting around organizing work in Oxnard and about other locations where we could perform the play. People really loved the puppets and we look forward to gaining more ease and fluidity using them for future performances. It was a successful and fun experience sharing PFSP’s work with a new audience. We were one of the few environmental justice-focused presentations at the festival, where many exhibitors didn’t bring that lens to Earth Day.
The next day we participated in the Santa Paula Earth Day event focused on environmental justice that was organized by youth from Santa Paula CAUSE. We shared a table with Tequio and brought the puppets and the drift/ban Chlorpyrifos flyers to share. We networked and built relationships with more CAUSE organizers and youth as well with Tequio youth. There were some wonderful speakers featuring youth, Chumash community members, and local leaders. The highlight was a rally and march around the park with all the participants chanting for environmental justice.
Fall 2023
Ongoing Hands-On Regenerative Farming Experiences: Community Roots & Rio Regenerative Farm
Interns are deepening their experience and knowledge by participating in hands-on work and learning at Community Roots Garden and Rio Regenerative Farm. These hands-on sessions also provide opportunities for community outreach, team building and organizing. At Community Roots we’ve had the opportunity to harvest squash and help with native plant propagation. At the Rio Regenerative Farm, we have been able to support the “year 0” of transitioning the farm from organic strawberries to a diverse educational farm. PFSP interns have helped apply mountains of compost to the new beds, transplanted hundreds of cabbage and broccoli sprouts, learned to push a paper-pot transplanting device down the row for efficient planting, planted pomegranate trees, harvested multi-colored radishes, and helped install drip tape irrigation. Farmer Edgar Espinosa is a great educator and can draw from his experiences running large scale conventional farms as well as regenerative agriculture experience. In our many discussions while we work, we have discussed topics ranging from the importance of water conservation, the future of how Oxnard land is used and who controls it, stories about racism against Bracero-era farmworkers, stories about how our different grandparents have grown food, stories about how the food distribution system works at present, and how important integrated animal systems are for nutrient cycling. The plan is for this farm to provide significant produce to the Rio schools. Click for a brief video of Rio Regenerative Farm.
Compost Tea Party at Rio Plaza Elementary, November 8, 2023
A Compost Tea Party is an event that brings community members together to provide hands-on lessons and education for students, staff, and community members around nature-based climate solutions. These solutions include applying compost tea to campuses instead of toxic pesticides, having cafeterias serve local and organic food, providing garden-based and nutrition education, and much more. The event most often takes the form of an environmental fair held at our local public schools.
For the Compost Tea Party at Rio Plaza Elementary this fall, interns prepared and taught a workshop on pesticide drift. In both English and Spanish, they explained what pesticides are and why farmers and landscapers use them, then defined drift (“anytime pesticides go where they weren’t intended to go”) and gave a visual and experiential example of how it works. They delivered this workshop to hundreds of students and then assisted them in applying Compost Tea to the school’s lawn. Click for a short video excerpt.
Click for a longer video with a visual simulation of pesticide drift.
Environmental Justice Workshops (Theater of the Oppressed)
In 2023-2024, PFSP interns will lead Environmental Justices Workshops using arts-based methods and facilitate group processes around what actions community members can take for a healthier community. These sessions will center on issues of pesticide drift, pesticide impacts on human and environmental health, alternatives to toxic pesticides, and other environmental justice issues. Workshops will be offered to community youth groups, at schools, public events, and other sites as organized by our group. They will include political theater and theater of the oppressed methods, community council circles, and opportunities to participate in actions.
In October and Novermber, PFSP students participated in two Theater of the Oppressed workshops with Daphnie Sicre, professor at Loyola Marymount University. These workshops were an opportunity to learn from an expert in community and participatory theater, and having her presence and guidance helped the interns rise to the challenge of creating a theater piece about the impact of pesticides on our community. For an in-depth description of this process, click below.
The creation of Pesticide-Drift Workshops using Theater of the Oppressed techniques.
Ultimately the scenario and dialogue from the two groups was combined into one. Daphne guided us in how to do this and what other tools we could use to include content and make the scenes matter. For example, she suggested we don’t have the characters say statistics but we could have signs with them that go across the stage. She led us in the idea of using fast-forwards in time so that the three scenes take place at different points in the characters’ lives.
Between the workshops, we created a first draft of a playable script to bring to the second workshop. We performed the first draft and made many notes on how we would tweak the script for more clarity. The interns got to spend a lot of this workshop learning how to be the facilitator, or joker, with two of them doing the whole play as the facilitator. This role helps set the tone and structure for the audience and then facilitates their interventions and the following discussion afterwards.
Our next step is to practice more, add to the script, and prepare for our first two performances. These are on December 2 and 9 with CAUSE’s Oxnard youth group and Tequio’s Oxnard youth group respectively. It will be nice to do the pieces for the first time for these audiences who are already invested in and skilled at community changemaking. The play purposely leaves the audience uncomfortable; in other words, it is unresolved. However, our job will be to leave the audience with some semblance of hope and what they can do to make change. It’s a big and complicated story to tell, but with our collective ideas we are getting closer to how to do this. Daphne plans to attend our first performance as a support. We’ll also invite Teresa Gomez, the local organizer from Californians for Pesticide Reform, to attend one or both of them. The interns are excited about this forum!
Spring 2023
OUR ANNUAL COMPOST TEA PARTY!
On May 31, 2023, more than 500 students between kindergarten and fifth grade participated in the EFC/PFSP’s fourth annual Compost Tea Party. The students participated in a series of workshops about nature-based climate solutions, led by community leaders, and took action to move their campus toward reducing pesticide use by applying compost tea to their soccer field. The students, teachers, staff, and community members were also treated to a special school lunch obtained entirely from Ventura County farmers.
PFSP Project Director Florencia Ramirez led the compost tea application workshop and taught students about healthy soil, carbon sequestration, and the links between soil solutions and climate resilience. PFSP interns and peer organizers designed and delivered two workshops for students: one about how to report pesticide drift incidents, and the other about how to write to your local government to make change to using fewer pesticides on community parks near schools. The elementary students produced wonderful letters and drawings in response to these workshops and left talking about how they could make a difference.
Community partners for the other workshops included FoodCorps members; Rincon Vitova insectaries; Once Upon a Watershed; Oxnard High School Culinary Arts students; and local farmer Edgar, who provides produce to the school regularly. Topics included farm tasting, beneficial bugs, soil and the senses, compost basics, rock painting, nature bingo, seed balls, show & tell sensory table, compost “cakes,” food demos, nature journaling, and more.
The PFSP interns and staff participated in interviews that will be made into two videos: one about “What is the PFSP?” and a longer one that will be a “How to Make a Compost Tea Party” documentary, interviewing key players about their roles in making the event happen. The hope is that this video, along with templates for the event, will help to make this event replicable in other school districts near and far.
This was a very successful event and the PFSP was honored to continue our work in the Rio School District, where we’ve invested four years of environmental literacy education. We’re excited to see the changes small and large that have come from this focus on the Rio District, including the district being named a 2023 California Green Ribbon School District Sustainability Honoree—one of only two districts in the county to receive this distinction.
Click for a few brief peeks into the event:
Creative application of compost tea!
PFSP interns lead an advocacy workshop.
Two of the nature-based climate solution workshops led by community groups.
PFSP Interns and Staff Participate in the 2023 Bioneers Conference
The Pesticide Free Soil Project (PFSP) was accepted to the youth program at the 34th annual Bioneers Conference (April 5-9). The Bioneers Conference features renowned leaders in many different fields, coming together to share perspectives on environmental justice, or in their words: to “highlight breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet.” It was an incredible opportunity for our youth to connect with organizations, meet other activist youth from all over the country, and hear from inspiring speakers. We had eight young people participate, all of whom got to network with others and to share about the important work they do in Ventura County. They were willing to take their spring break vacations to travel together by train to Berkeley, CA, where the conference is held.
One important part of attending this conference was that it gave our young people context for how their work locally is part of a number of larger movements globally – and allowed them to connect their own activism with that of other youth from all around the country. Our youth were also able to connect the way this conference was held to their own conference – the Other Strawberry Festival – and we spent time brainstorming how we want to be informed by the Bioneers gathering when we hold our own virtual event.
This was truly a special opportunity for the PFSP and the Encampment to connect with organizations and youth who are working for environmental justice solutions and to find our place within a powerful network of changemakers.
Here are highlights of what the young people shared in response to attending the conference:
“Being able to hear from different youth was so inspiring, especially the People of Color Youth Caucus. I felt so lucky to participate in such a beautiful workshop. What was so special about this workshop was that it was interactive and gave us all the chance to learn about different cultures and ways to embrace our culture/ancestors.” – Mari
“Bioneers allowed me to get a glimpse of the countless ways we as society can work towards achieving environmental justice. Most of the speakers that I listened to were older folks who shared their wisdom on how they deal with issues they are particularly interested in and provided advice applicable to all areas of interest. It was a beautiful experience getting to know folks, connect with like-minded people, and be in a place of hope and transformation.” – Moncerrat
“I learned how indigenous people from around the world are finding ways to fight racist governmental laws to connect with traditional practices that help the earth. I am coming out of this trip with new information and perspectives.” – Joaquin
“I connect to our PFSP work the things I learned about indigeneity, healing from colonization, and land rights. These are all things to consider and incorporate into PFSP work we and I do. What was helpful about this trip was connecting, learning, and stepping out of my comfort zone.” – Piper
Fall 2022
To learn more about the impact of Silent Spring, click this link:
https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/envh10.sci.life.eco.silentspring/rachel-carsons-silent-spring/ Content warning: animals suffering.
The interns are participating in hands-on training in regenerative agriculture techniques at the Community Roots Garden in Oxnard.
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Project Director Florencia Ramirez (right) with intern Joaquin harvesting cempasúchil (Día de Muertos marigolds) at Community Roots Garden.
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Intern Piper making bundles of cempasúchil.
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In this Instagram post, Marianna, Florencia and Piper are harvesting butternut squash at Community Roots Garden.
Plans are ongoing for the spring compost tea party and The Other Strawberrry Festival, PFSP’s major events. Meanwhile the interns’ social media campaign continues to reach more people, educating the community on pesticides, Indigenous issues and regenerative agriculture.
Click for PFSP’s instagram video of Piper harvesting butternut squash: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiVcHD5popY/?hl=en
Background on PFSP
Compost tea party.
In 2019, the Ventura County Pesticide-Free Soil Project (PFSP) evolved from a collaboration with EFC alums, local schools and community-based organizations shining a light on the issue of pesticide-use at school sites and its impact on people in the surrounding neighborhoods.
A core of local EFC alums plus 2020 Encampers are engaged in more training and organizing experience in conjunction with our organizational partners: Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Abundant Table, El Rio School District, Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), the Public Health Institute, and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE).
PFSP’s “Compost Tea Parties” started the process of creating the first – and second – pesticide-free schools on the Oxnard Plain, which immediately helped improve soil and air quality for the surrounding community. That area has one of the highest pollution levels in the state, due to pesticide use. Several off-shoots, including an online nature-based climate solutions curriculum project and the “Heal the Earth” initiative, launched by third graders, are also the result of the PFSP initiative.
Due to COVID-19, the EFC pivoted to make the summer intensive virtual and activities in Ventura County safe for the young people and the other community members.
Under the leadership of Florencia Ramirez, PFSP Director, the PFSP continued during the spring and summer of 2020. PFSP responded particularly to COVID-19 by working with projects and initiatives addressing food insecurity, pesticides, farmworker health and policy work on the use of pesticides in Ventura County and throughout the state of California.
We have a stipended year-round internship program, under the direction of Juna Rosales Muller. We work with recent EFC alums from Ventura County to provide them with hands-on experience in organizing, engaging other youth, and deepening and expanding their leadership skills. These young people are often working two to three jobs, in addition to attending high school or college, and COVID-19 means layoffs for even those low-paying positions. Being able to offer stipends ensures that the young people have the support to work on the issues that affect their lives.
- This year the interns trained in regenerative agriculture and organic farming at The Abundant Table. Specifics include carrying out farm-based activities, such as working with plants, produce, tools, soil, seeds and irrigation; participating in training sessions onsite, such as lectures, demonstrations and workshops; and interacting with Abundant Table members and partner organizations, such as the Rodale Institute (socially distant, outdoors, masks on.)
- They also worked on the ARC project of the Public Health Institute, collaborating with ARC staff on a survey of South Oxnard parks in predominantly farmworker neighborhoods to understand the quality and conditions. The PFSP interns live in these communities. This mobilizing effort is in concert with a larger ARC focus on heat illness prevention for farmworkers in light of a changing climate, which includes looking at shade access in parks within primarily farmworker neighborhoods. PFSP interns recently presented some of their findings and recommendations to the city of Oxnard parks commission where they proposed a city-wide policy change to improve parks in low-income farmworker areas.
- They developed a social media environmental justice social media campaign on Instagram and Facebook with a growing following. They used what they were learning as a springboard to discuss concepts such as climate change, carbon sequestration, soil health, human health, farmworker health, pesticide use and water scarcity, as well as illuminating a path forward.
- They were featured in a 15-minute video giving an overview of the PFSP project as part of the 2021 Santa Barbara Virtual Earth Day.
- This August, the PFSP interns and staff participated in a field week learning about environmental justice. They spent each morning at a local park exploring topics that included land access, racialization, economic relationships, pesticides, and case studies of environmental injustice. Each afternoon, they traveled to field sites throughout Ventura and Santa Barbara counties to see working examples of alternative relationships to land and community being modeled by local businesses, community groups, and nonprofits. PFSP Summer Update 2021
- The PFSP continues to organize with district teachers and their students to ask the School Board to formalize the pesticide-free landscape policy as the official district-wide policy.
- When COVID-safe, we will resume the Compost Tea Parties — aiming for at least two this year.
Click to watch interview on Instagram.
Yesenia, one of our Pesticide-Free Soil Project interns, explains why she cares about pesticide-free soil in this Instagram post. She’s coming to you from the Rodale Institute no-till pumpkin patch at the Abundant Table in Camarillo, CA.
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During the first month, I learned about different food systems and regenerative agriculture …
… as well as the negative health and environmental impacts of conventional farming as opposed to organic farming. I’ve learned a lot about the negative impact that COVID-19 has made on farmworker communities and the health inequities that these communities have to endure.